Dining Al Fresco

 

Present Day…

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Bits of chitin hit him in the face. Organic shrapnel ejected from a suicide bomber’s chest plate. He wiped it away. It was waxy to the touch. After detonation, it had traveled along on the explosion’s shock wave. Then the sonic boom hit. It deafened the crowd. Bursting bells rang out. The internal tuner in his head leaned toward an arpeggiated C-sharp minor. The resounding, opening bass octaves of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude Op. 3 No. 2.

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Then came the heavier things. Thrust upward from the initial blast, past their vertices, now hurtling down the right side of parabolic arcs. Onto the bistro table rained rubble – a hunk of fractured cobblestone, the splintered end of a wooden beam, stones, pebbles, and dirt.

 

They sat at their table on the outdoor patio, the three of them – Barnabas, Ruth, and Ophelia – each still holding their utensils, forelegs raised in crosses to protect their faces.

 

Barnabas looked at Ruth, limbs frozen. His brain took a moment to process what was happening. With cognition, it directed his heart to furiously pump hemolymph to his appendages. Respiration in overdrive. “Deliver more oxygen, regain motor function,” his ganglion told his body. His foreleg thawed then loosened. He pawed at the side of his pedipalps where the debris had struck him. He was cut badly. Pale blue liquid flowed down his side and dripped onto the floor from the pit of his elbow. He gripped the table, then stood up, wobbling on his claws.

 

It looked like it was going to rain all day. For that, most patrons mistook the initial blast for thunderstrike. But then there was a second thunderous boom, stronger than the first. It blindsided them just the same. This was no faceless act of mother nature. This was a nefarious act, one by wicked individuals.  

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That realization brought on pandemonium. Clusters of spiders scattered from the center of the square helter-skelter. Some stayed and hid under their tables. Crouching ducks.

 

With each strike more debris littered their table. A severed hind leg plopped down onto Barnabas’ dinner plate. The foreleg was dressed in black spandex, an acid green insignia of a gas mask just below the joint where the foreleg had been torn from the bomber’s thorax. Spandex! No one covered their forelegs in public.

 

The blasts kept coming in syncopated succession. It was musical.

 

And then a lull.

 

With the settling of dust came the larger-floating debris. Burning newspaper, ash and leaflets filled the sky like ticker tape. The sea of confetti blotted out a sun mostly hidden already by tumbling cumulonimbus.

 

A lone leaflet shifted left and right above their heads. It dropped onto the table like a feather from a bird of flight. It read:

 

O’ Brothers in arms,

Hold steadfast,

Fight till the day is done,

Long live the Mantodea,

We shall overcome.

 

Mantodea! The bombers were praying mantis terrorists. And of the worst kind. The Mantodea were a fractured cell, broken off from the Islamic State of Normantis and the Levanworth – the ISNL. They were hyper-radicalized. They made regular ISNL members look like a fraternity rather than a terrorist organization. And the ISNL were some abominable mantises; it was hard to believe there were echelons of evil above them.

 

Barnabas grabbed his daughter and tucked her inside his overcoat. He pulled his wife tightly by the foreleg and positioned her in front of him to sandwich Ophelia. Huddled together, they advanced as quickly as they could without falling over.  Barnabas guided them to the front entrance of the restaurant. He pushed at the door. It budged slightly but held tight. Lowering his thorax, he battered forward, this time with all his force. The door didn’t move any more than the first time. It must be barricaded from the inside, he thought.  

Barnabas pulled his wife and daughter back to him and turned the corner searching for cover.

 

A small cat sat sprawled out, about a quarter of the way down the sidewalk. Her back was arched, her body pressed against the brick wall of the restaurant. She held her head in her paws. Between gasps of air, she dribbled blood onto the ground near her feet. She was badly wounded. The lower half of her jaw dangled awkwardly, connected to her head from just its right hinge. Her spotted snow-white hair had turned gray from dust matted into the clumps of her coagulated blood. Her tail had been partially blown off; what was left of it looked like the squashed end of a stubbed-out cigar.

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The cat held her paw out to Barnabas for help. Normally he would, but not now, not when his family was still in peril.

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The three of them frantically continued searching for a place to hide.

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A mantis in a trench coat stood at the corner. He looked up and saw Barnabas running in his direction. To this, the mantis dropped to his knee and fed shells into a shotgun. Barnabas pushed his wife and daughter to the side, cutting into the street. They sprinted forward, heads down and hunched over, with their forelegs tight to their sides. They ran behind the cover of a line of cars.

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Gunshots rang out from the corner.

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Bodies were strewn randomly throughout the street. Hodgepodge. Most lay prostrate, not moving. A kaleidoscope of bodily fluids painted the street – hemolymph-blue, red, yellow, and green. It looked shiny and slick, but when they stepped on it, their claws stuck making smacking sounds each time they pulled their limbs up.  

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A body swung down from a tree as they ran by. Impaled at the thorax, it still wore a smile on its face. What a way to go, to die happy in this sad, sad world.

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All this just couldn’t be real, Barnabas thought. These had to be actors in a scene of some post-apocalyptic production. These things didn’t happen, couldn’t happen, especially to good spiders.

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The trio kept running, found an opening between two cars and cut back towards the rear of the restaurant. Dashing across the sidewalk, they narrowly escaped the brunt of a buckshot blast from the corner assassin, a few pellets finding their way into Barnabas’ right foreleg.

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Barnabas made Ruth and Ophelia crouch next to a dumpster while he searched for a way into the restaurant. The rear kitchen door was slightly ajar, propped open by a fire extinguisher. Kitchens ran really hot those days, he thought, the workers must have left the door open to relieve them from the stagnant heat. Barnabas pulled Ruth and Ophelia in, grabbed the fire extinguisher, then slammed the door shut. He pushed back at it to make sure it was locked.  

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The kitchen was packed with cooks, waiters and diners huddled together. Standing room only. They walked past a line of doors that were all locked. At the end of the hallway on the left, they came to the restaurant’s main bar. Hordes of patrons had already taken cover between the backbar and the serving counter; they lay on the floor stacked on top of each other, three deep. A cluster of spiders scrabbled at openings between bodies trying to get to the bottom of the pile.

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Barnabas looked right to an empty dining room. The room was a shambles: chairs overturned, tables smashed in half, dust and debris an inch deep covered everything like a fresh blanket of snowfall. Half of the ceiling was caved in, the other half hanging precariously, plastered crown molding beginning to fall off. A beam of light shone through a blasted opening in the ceiling, illuminating an empty table at the center of the room. At the table sat an old spider, hunched over, his chelicerae hanging down into a still-warm bowl of soup.

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Barnabas, his wife and daughter took shelter under the dining table to the right of the bar. They lay on their sternums, as flat as possible to the ground, with their forelegs on their heads.

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They waited. What else could they do?

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Another explosion went off, this one right outside the restaurant. It sent a metal garbage can hurtling through the glass front door. Shards rained down.

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A long silence.

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Barnabas stood slowly and scanned the storefront, sidestepped, then crouched at the side of the bar. He peered out over the top of the serving counter between a lazy Susan of donuts and a diner slumped over his dinner plate. Barnabas’ eyes tracked scores of black figures covered in those acid green markings advancing towards the restaurant. They were coming from all directions. The restaurant was being surrounded.  

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What were they after? Were they after him? If they were, what was it they wanted? He seemed to be the axis upon which all centripetal forces were converging. Everything pulling inward towards him. Each time he retreated, the ring of chaos tightened.

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Just then, his fears became more pointed, shooting through him like a bolt. Barnabas sprang up at attention. He was naked and exposed, but his adrenaline gave him unbridled courage, that momentarily quelled his panic.  

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“Barnie, what the hell are you doing? Get down!” Ruth barked at him.

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“Lower your voice, they will hear us,” he whispered. “I have to go back out.”

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Ruth slid over, grabbed him around the thorax and pulled him down with her full weight so they were lying face to face.

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Bullets whizzed overhead. One struck the lazy Susan and spun it on its axis, the centrifugal force scattering donuts on the floor next to them.  

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“Are you insane? You can’t go back outside,” Ruth said.

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“But my files! I left them on the table. I must get them,” Barnabas replied.

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“You’ll get yourself killed. You’ll get us killed. Forget about your files for once.”

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“I can’t forget about my files Ruth. I must get them.”

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“Barnabas! Don’t be absurd. What you must do is get us out of here or we’ll all die,” Ruth said. She was now begging.

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“I will get us out, don’t worry. But first, my papers.”

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Ruth held on tighter, but her grip was too tenuous. Barnabas shook free and skittered away.

He rolled out in front of the counter, grabbed a donut and stuffed it into his pocket. Crouched down on his forelegs, he slid forward, keeping his body as low as he could to the floor. He tipped a table on its side, using it as a shield. He pushed it forward in short bursts. With each thrust, it parted a sea of crumpled glass.

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At the front of the restaurant, he waited for a reprieve from the gunfire. Soft crackling, gravel crunching in the distance, murmured voices, then an eerie silence – a short break for him to make a quick move. Squeezing through an opening in the storefront that had been blown open by the blast, he rolled out of the restaurant onto the sidewalk.  

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As quickly as it died down, the gunfire erupted again.

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He dove under a volley, rolled, and skidded against a planter next to the bistro table. He pulled the donut from his pocket and threw it up in the air to his right. It was a brief distraction as it took loads of fire, allowing him to spring left and swipe his papers from the table. Then he burst out running headlong.

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‘Don’t run in a straight line, you’ll be too easy of a target.  That’s how you’ll get yourself hit. Run like a gazelle. Side to side, side to side,’ he said.  

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Around the corner he ran past the same gray-haired cat he saw earlier. He overshot her, doubled back, and then grabbed her by the leg.

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“Come with me”, Barnabas said.

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The cat could barely move her body. He reached down and scooped her up into his oversized crook, his giant spider body enveloping her tiny frame.

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“We must abscond from here!”

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Barnabas ran down the block with the cat under his foreleg. He skittered up behind a tree and peered out from its side, scoping the corner. The shotgunner was gone. Together they ran across the sidewalk to the restaurant’s back door and pushed hard on it. It was locked. He had locked it from the inside. How would they get back in?

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From above. Through the giant hole the bombers had blasted through the roof. 

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Barnabas scuttled up the wall holding the cat tight to his thorax. He stopped at the edge of the parapet, clinging to it with hairy claws. He peeked out over the edge and scanned from left to right. Grey dust wafted up through the hole in the roof. Metal rebar poking out from the jagged edges of the cratered slab split rising dirt particles into small pockets, those small dust balloons rising further and further, and then disappearing into the deep sky. The wind shifted and then died down, the dirty mist settling.

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From behind that sand-dotted screen, cloaked assassins - raiders of the ephemeral pingfeng – appeared. They each wore patches on their upper leg sleeves emblazoned in large font with the symbol م – Arabic for the letter ‘M’.

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One of the assassins, a tall and svelte mantis wearing a neat goatee and sunglasses, stood confidently at their front. He commanded authority just by way of his stature – head cocked to one side peering off into the distance, not caring if he was there or anywhere else on the planet for that matter. His hair was slicked back and glued down to his head. He was a gangster, everything about him screamed it. Call him Goatee. He gave orders to two smaller, scruffy-looking mantis henchmen, each of them with ever longer, thicker beards covering their green faces, Short Beard and Long Beard—The Beards.

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The Beards prepared a massive bomb. More than a dozen red cylinders, stacked up in the shape of a prism wrapped tightly in black electrical tape, stood before them. Just by virtue of its size, Barnabas surmised, the bomb could level the rest of the building along with the two or three next to it.

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As Goatee watched, The Beards uncoiled a long fuse and laid it out flat along the side of the roof. At the foot of the bomb, they left a good measure of slack in the fuse line to allow for its long descent down into the restaurant’s dining room. With a nonchalant side-step, Goatee kicked the bomb into the hole. It came to rest with a resounding thud. Short Beard fumbled with the end of the fuse and a book of matches, all the while Long Beard fumbled with a pocketknife that he used to pick dirt from beneath his tarsal claws. Goatee looked on at his mumbling, fumbling crew, wishing he had been a better judge of character or at least a better judge of potential skill during each of their interviews.  

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In the delay brought on by The Beards’ incompetence, Barnabas sprang to action. He jumped up on the parapet, sucked in his thorax, and pushed his spinneret down and outward between his spindly legs. He fired. A ropy silk strand shot forward and stuck tightly to Long Beard’s left shoulder. Barnabas took off to the right, encircling the three bombers while keeping the silk strand tight. As he wrangled them in, they struggled, grasping at rifles strapped to their backs. They were effectively disarmed, their forelegs pinned at their abdomens by the tight gooey silk. Goatee was pressed in at the center, sandwiched by the bearded duo. The Beards laughed loudly, oblivious to the fact that they were under attack. In their ineptitude, they thought it was just another joke in their brotherly fracas.

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Goatee struggled to scream. He let out a hushed cry of vulgarities from deep within his tightly compressed thorax. He cursed his assailant, cursed his crew, and cursed the heavens above, or maybe below, for his helpless state.

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Circling the roof again for good measure, Barnabas wrapped them in a final loop of silk and pulled as tightly as he could. He cut the end of the rope at his spinneret and tucked it up inside the bunch, ending it in a taut hitch. He tipped the trio over and rolled them towards the opposite end of the roof. The whole way they hemmed and hawed - a cacophonous barrel of monkeys.

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Crisis averted.

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Now to rescue his ladies.

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Barnabas dropped through the hole in the roof landing on top of a mound of broken glass. It crunched under his claws as he shifted his weight. He bounded towards Ruth and Ophelia.  

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“Ruth, hurry, we must leave now,” he spoke in a hushed yet frantic tone. 

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Ruth pulled Ophelia close to her and edged out towards the ray of light coming in through the roof’s opening. Barnabas grabbed his daughter and pulled her onto his back while still holding the stray cat under his thorax.  They glided up the concrete slope and emerged onto the flat part of the roof. Skittering into the corner, they crouched down behind the protection of the roof’s parapet.

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Barnabas shot out rainbows of thread that formed tear-shaped loops. They crisscrossed over each other and, together, took on a bulbous shape. The wind, picking up at that point, filled the balloon with a warm current of air. Barnabas grabbed at the knotted silk end of the buoyant gossamer and held tightly. They floated up, Ruth hanging from a silken skiff of her own. Sailing out into the swirls of ruby-painted sea skies they dodged gunfire and incendiaries hurled by their terrestrial assailants.

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When they were finally out of range of enemy fire, they calmed down, Barnabas letting out a gasp.

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“Is everyone ok?” he asked.

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Ophelia patted his back to signal she was ok, and Ruth gave him a look of slight relief.

He then focused on the cat, opening his foreleg before him to have a look at her face.

 

“What is your name?” Barnabas asked the cat.

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She opened her mouth to speak, and her jaw hung down wide. She let out a yelp and then pushed her jaw back up into place with her paw. It was completely detached at the joint and pouring blood.  

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“She’s hurt bad Ruth. She needs help.”

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“Who is she?” Ruth asked.

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“I don’t know, but she was by herself outside the restaurant. She was helpless, I couldn’t just leave her there,” Barnabas said. He looked down into her eyes - tiny yellow robin-eggs. 

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“Barnie, you’re a good spider,” Ruth said.

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“I’m just doing what anybody else would have done,” he replied.

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Most spiders would, in fact, do nowhere near as much as he did for others. Barnabas was a rare breed, Ruth thought to herself.

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They continued along in their floating brigade. They covered fields of ground quickly, Barnabas shooting out silk at each tree they passed to pull them even faster. He needed to get the battered cat help as quickly as possible. She gripped tightly, cradled up within the sanctuary of his hold. She was hanging on, but her breathing was starting to slow.

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With the little energy the rescued cat could muster, she pulled her paw to her side and unzipped her handbag. Her other paw still held her jaw in place to keep her excruciating pain at bay. She milled through her belongings searching for something. Each sharp movement sent a shock up her body into her jaw no matter how slowly and gently she attempted to rearrange her position. She found what she was looking for and pulled it behind her back - a honed folding blade. With her paw she splayed the blade open and gripped it tenuously. Her pulse was thing and she was still bleeding profusely.

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The cat raised her paw and thrust it forward. She attempted to bury the blade in Barnabas’ back. As she jabbed, a neural shock went up her side - so painful, it paralyzed her, her body going limp. To the ground went the blade. 

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